Why spend your money on food that does not give you strength?
    Why pay for food that does you no good?
Listen to me, and you will eat what is good.
    You will enjoy the finest food!

Isaiah 55:2

If I had to, I believe I could write a decent glossy magazine food column. You know, look at the whole experience with an evaluative frame of mind. Critique. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Stage the photographs. Talk about things like flavor profile, presentation, ambiance, and originality. Develop a scale of one to ten.

But I am a sucker for good food and I quickly get distracted. Then I get involved in the meal and I forget to do anything other than enjoy it. At least that’s what I did on the cruise… several times a day! For every photograph I took there were likely a couple of better ones I missed because I had already eaten the pretty parts of the presentation!

But I believe there is enough in this collection to give a good reflection of Holland America’s cruise cuisine. And I am here to say that it was very very good.

Seriously. The quality of the dining experience on our recent cruise was so consistently far above average I was kind of blown away.

“Elevated” dining experiences:

Not just quality, but presentation too. And yes, the way a dish is presented – plated – really does have an impact on the food experience. It’s an area of cooking I really want to work on because my food – no matter how good my cooking – just tends to sit in a lump on the plate and I know I can do better.

And not just the “elevated” dinner reservations. The three upgraded meals – the Italian bistro, the steakhouse, and the French restaurant – were indeed phenomenal. But the “regular” evenings in the dining room also consistently exceeded our expectations.

Real table clothes, fine linen, very nice china, first class wait staff, a variety of menu choices every evening, fine wine, wonderful bread, tasty appetizers, classy entrées, indulgent deserts, great coffee. It was in every sense dinner worth getting dressed up for.

This was one of the reasons we went with a cruise for this 12 days of healing. Grabbing an Airbnb at the beach, or in the mountains, would have involved taking care of our own cooking and kitchen chores.

But for this short couple of weeks, blissfully, Rebekah and I were pampered. And sometimes – if only very rarely – we all need a little of that.

Grateful – and, temporarily, just a little over my ideal weight – DEREK

“We all eat, and it would be a sad waste of opportunity to eat badly.”

Anna Thomas

42 food photos. Not in order of preference but order of appearance